by Todd Rose
From my point of view, my behavior was easy to understand: I was simply reacting reasonably to what I perceived as other people being mean to me. And of course, the worse I behaved, the meaner they all were.
My brothers and sisters, for instance, had long ago learned how to provoke me with sinister efficiency. They called me “Toad” and “ree-tard,” whispering behind my mother’s back, at which point I’d lunge at them, and they’d cry, and I’d end up being the only one punished. They felt that was only fair, not only because of how much I’d bullied them personally, but because of how everything I did reflected on them, getting them banned from neighborhood pools, parks, and parties.
Home, in other words, wasn’t exactly a haven for me, although school was much worse. By sixth grade I’d lost all my former friends, and day after day I faced the humiliation of having no one to sit next to at lunch. Kids teased me and teachers nagged me, complaining that I was disruptive and wouldn’t follow instructions. When I recall today how most people reacted to me back then, I recognize that while there were times when it was clear that I was in the wrong, just as there were times where I was clearly unjustly treated, these extremes were exceptions. Instead, much of the time I probably missed cues and misunderstood directions, in subtle ways that made people think I was rude, willful, and lazy. Given that I had no clue why I affected other people like that, I got used to feeling like a victim, even when others characterized me as a villain.
A Bad Fit
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You may have already figured out by now that for a kid like I used to be, sitting still and minding my own business for hour after hour in a classroom would be a special challenge. And you would have figured right. Even as an adult, I find it excruciatingly painful to endure even the few minutes of obligatory lull in a movie theater before the previews begin. Yet this is nothing compared to the soul-crushing tedium prevalent in most U.S. classrooms.
We adults tend to forget the enormous amount of time that dragged by when we were students, as teachers passed out papers or spoke individually with our classmates. But from time to time we get stirring reminders. After systematically following fifty-two high school boys, who were either high achieving, run-of-the-mill, or struggling academically through their daily routines in U.S. public school classrooms, the author and education reformer Jeffrey Wilhelm concluded that boredom, which he called “an underestimated force in education,” was responsible for “everything from bullying to dropping out.”
Throughout the United States, with very few exceptions, most schools still follow the old-fashioned model: a teacher stands in front of students sitting in neat lines of desks, with their textbooks opened before them. This helps explain why the writer and former psychotherapist Thom Hartmann calls ADHD, with its extreme intolerance for boredom, a “context disorder.” That’s probably closer to the truth, in my opinion.
Not surprisingly, few if any classrooms in rural Utah questioned this model of conformity in the years I was growing up. The mere fact that I was left-handed struck a few of my most doctrinaire grade school teachers as, literally, satanic. I never felt much difference, in fact, between sitting in school and sitting in church. In both settings, the authority vested in the adult in charge was absolute. In both settings, kids were expected to sit silently while contemplating what Harvard’s Kurt Fischer refers to as the “holy book.” In both settings, despite all the effort I’d make to control myself, I’d ultimately, continually, disturb the peace.
The cognitive scientist David Rose (who is a colleague, but not a family member) says that for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, boring schools are the perfect bad match for kids with short attention spans and a low tolerance for boredom. “We not only don’t educate them—we damage them,” he says.
At the very least, we give many millions of kids the message they have to change their biology—their very nature—to fit into the rigid environment of school. The pediatrician who first diagnosed me with ADHD gave my mom a prescription for the stimulant Ritalin, the most common treatment, then and now, for restless square pegs. I took the pills on and off for the next three years, with some early success. Taking the drug initially helped me get A’s and kind words from teachers during my first semester in seventh grade. Yet whenever I stopped, my grades plummeted, and my teachers returned to complaining.
While I recognized the benefits, that didn’t stop me from hating the Ritalin. It made my sleep problems even worse and reduced my appetite a bit, but most important to me, it made me feel I couldn’t be “normal” without medication. More often than not, I just faked taking the pills and threw them away—especially after the humiliating tenth-grade drama class in which my teacher once shouted: “For the love of God, Todd, didn’t you take your pill today?” Indeed, I hadn’t.
When I turned sixteen, my mother had the foresight and initiative to do something that was avant-garde for that time, the year 1990. She drove me to Salt Lake City for a neuropsychological evaluation by a psychologist, Sam Goldstein, who, after a few hours of testing and interviews, confirmed the initial diagnosis of ADHD and, crucially, helped her along on her path of understanding more about my puzzling behavior. (As part of his inquiry, for instance, Goldstein sent questionnaires to three of my teachers, who observed me both on and off stimulants. They all thought I was fine on the Ritalin, yet when I wasn’t medicated, all three rated me above the 98th percentile in “hyperkinetic behavior,” noting “severe” problems with “restlessness, unpredictable behavior, distractibility, inattention, disturbing others, excitability, impulsivity, failing to finish things and being easily frustrated in his efforts.”)
In contrast to my busy pediatrician, who diagnosed me in the standard manner—taking about a half hour to analyze written responses from my mother and me to an itemized checklist of symptoms—Goldstein provided my mother with a ten-page report that detailed some of my strengths and weaknesses. Among other things—and this is common for many kids like me—he discovered a 14-point gap between my verbal IQ and my academic performance. Something was getting in the way—something that Goldstein suggested was at least in part a mix of my attention deficit and my resultant anxiety.
As awareness of learning and behavioral differences increases, this type of extensive neuropsychological evaluation is becoming increasingly popular as an initial step for parents of children with suspected learning challenges. The chief obstacle for most parents is the expense, combined with the fact that so few insurance plans cover such exams. Schools are supposed to provide thorough testing, as long as there’s good reason to believe a child is struggling with a learning impairment. My mother never tried to get my school to pay, assuming she’d be turned down. But she later told me that she felt the information she received was worth the expense, since it armed her to face anyone—teachers, family members, and even know-it-all neighbors—for years to come, whenever they suggested that my bad behavior was due to bad character.
Lyda on Her Own
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My mother, as I’ve understood only in recent years, needed all the support she could get. While of course I wasn’t the only young troublemaking square peg in Hooper, mothers of such kids as a rule didn’t confide in each other. That would be airing dirty laundry, advertising the failures they couldn’t help but feel were their fault.
In those years, in other parts of the country, parents of kids whose learning differences clashed with their school system were starting to form support groups. For example, CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) launched its first chapter in Plantation, Florida, in 1987, eventually gathering thousands of members throughout the nation over the next decade. It would have been nice for Lyda if something like that existed in Hooper, during her hard slog through the 1980s. As she has since told me, she would have been on-her-knees grateful for even one friend or neighbor to say, “I don’t understand what you’re going through, but how can I help?” Or at school, if someone said, “Let’s work on this toge
ther. What can we do to help him?” Lyda says, “Everyone had an opinion about what I should be doing, but I’d have jumped for joy if they’d just said something like that.”
On top of the lack of empathy was a lack of useful data. Most pediatricians knew next to nothing about the characteristics of ADHD or other learning issues, let alone what could be done to support these kids. Netscape, the first Internet browser, was launched only in 1995, and it would be several years after that before decent websites about these issues existed.
This makes me all the more impressed by my mom’s resolve to educate herself. In fact, I’m pretty sure she got a kick out of all that learning she was doing—not just about me, but about her family and herself. From her conversations with Goldstein, she understood for the first time that the characteristics of ADHD, like so many other basic ways of reacting to the world, usually begin with a genetic legacy that predisposes a child to certain behaviors, which are then shaped by that child’s environment. She suddenly saw the legacy throughout her family tree, most dramatically in the case of her big brother, Bob, a troublemaker who not only failed all his classes but drank, smoked, and roamed the streets late at night, and eventually landed in reform school for burglarizing a church. Several years later, Bob found happiness as a long-haul trucker, which Lyda took as a hopeful sign that even the squarest of pegs can find contexts that suit them.
Moreover, after seeing Bob in this new light, Lyda reconsidered her own restless life, a process that led her to the realization that she and I weren’t so different. Like me, she gets bored easily and loves to go on adventures, such as traveling to exotic places. She can’t sit for any length of time without jiggling her foot, and, while, unlike me, she has always been a dedicated Mormon, she has never been the unquestioning kind. When I was still in high school in Hooper, for example, my mom gained a certain local notoriety for being the only member of the town council to publicly oppose a new pig farm that was stinking up our neighborhood. Unlike her colleagues on that august body, she didn’t think it was relevant that the farm was owned by a prominent member of the local lay Mormon leadership. What mattered to her was that the smelly business violated the zoning laws, so she pursued the issue until it was shut down. Her picture appeared in the local newspaper; she made enemies among the farmer’s many allies, and through it all appeared to thoroughly enjoy herself. Similarly, I suspect she got at least a little thrill, at least on some occasions, from going to battle on my behalf with adults she thought misunderstood me.
Education for All?
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While Lyda was educating herself about the nature and nurture of learning differences, so—albeit much more slowly—was the rest of America. A lot of this awakening was forced on the country as a series of lawsuits and federal legislation led to fundamental change in what at least some parents could expect from schools. The changes began by addressing the gravest injustices: for most of the twentieth century, children with major disabilities—such as being blind, deaf, or labeled “emotionally disturbed” or “mentally retarded”—were explicitly excluded from public schools. As a result, an estimated one million U.S. children, many of whom might have benefited from mainstream schools with minor amounts of support, had no access to free education, while another 3.5 million were segregated in substandard programs.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, federal legislation cleared the way for the “mainstreaming” of students with physical and mental handicaps, a policy officially adopted in 1990 when Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Amendments to the act seven years later guaranteed all children the right to a “free, appropriate” education in the “least restrictive environment” possible.
Today, more than six million U.S. children are receiving some sort of special educational support under this law and through parallel legislation stemming from Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. The kinds of support offered ranges from training teachers in special education to providing aides for students who need them, to sometimes even paying private tuition for kids who can’t get a “free, appropriate” education in public schools, to such relatively minor accommodations as giving kids with learning challenges more time to work on tests.
On the one hand, I’m moved by how much we’ve learned, as a nation, in barely three decades, and how much more support children can receive in schools today. On the other hand, I’m surprised at the depth of ignorance that remains. For example, one national poll, published in October 2010, reported that a majority of Americans still believe that learning disabilities are a “product of the home environment.” We’ve still got a long way to go.
Considering the continuing prevalence of public ignorance about learning differences, I cringe to imagine what it was like for my mom in rural Utah, twenty years ago. She tells me that, for the most part, it was much easier to cope with outright criticism from the people she knew didn’t care about me than it was to fend off advice from people determined to be helpful—in other words, the well-wishers. My dad’s mom, for instance, who was staunchly opposed to “unnatural” pharmaceutical stimulants, insisted on providing me with herbal milk shakes produced by the Utah-based Sunrider Corporation. My mom yielded to pressure, and I drank the awful shakes for a few months, until it was clear to all concerned that they weren’t changing my behavior. A few years later, we learned that the Utah Department of Agriculture had closed the company’s plant, after finding that the soybeans they imported from China were tainted with salmonella.
Fending off her mother-in-law was hard enough for Lyda. Resisting my father’s parenting strategy, as much as she disagreed with it, was unfortunately often beyond her.
Hurt
* * *
When I think back on it, it’s easy for me today to see just how much my dad always loved me, even during the darkest of my childhood years. Alas, however, it wasn’t always so.
Granted, all through my increasingly challenging adolescence, he was doing his best to provide for our family, against daunting odds, and under mounting stress. Having graduated college by taking classes at night, my dad was at this point working as a mechanic at the shop his father managed, while earning about ten dollars an hour. His many hours of overtime were the only reason we managed to hold onto the house.
Worried, harassed, and reeking of oil and hydraulic fuel, my dad would come home late in the evenings, only to hear the latest discouraging news from my mother about how I’d failed another class, or stolen money from her purse, or tormented my siblings, or left a bag of flaming poo on a neighbor’s doorstep, inciting the unlucky recipient to stomp out the flames (note: this really works like it does in the movies … amazing!). All the while, his image of my future grew sharper and darker. “I knew Todd was smart, I just thought he would be a smart criminal!” he told one interviewer, in what has to be one of my all-time favorite quotes—and one that I’ve teased him about throughout the years.
My father never followed my mother on her trips to the doctors with me, partly because he was either at work or in school, but also because he never bought the paradigm of me as a patient who needed curing. His own diagnosis of my behavior was simple: I was a budding juvenile delinquent, who needed a stronger hand—literally. Throughout my teens, this fear drove an otherwise gentle man to mimic his own dad’s parenting, which featured more yelling and spanking than encouragement or advice. Physical punishment never seemed like a good strategy to Lyda, however, and she wasn’t afraid to tell my father so. This caused a lot of arguments between them, with my dad accusing her of coddling me and failing to “set limits.”
While my mother didn’t win every parenting argument, nor did she back down. Instead she took a parenting course, read everything she could about learning differences, and argued ever more adamantly that I needed more encouragement, and less criticism and punishment. “Todd was dying inside, and for a while, I didn’t get that,” she’d recall, many years later. “But I finally decided that this kid cannot be attacked
everywhere. I had to change at least what happened between him and me.”
Only as an adult did I fully appreciate my mom’s efforts in this respect. Strong-willed as she was, and is, it still couldn’t have been easy to oppose my dad’s approach to teaching me discipline, particularly given how popular physical punishment was (and still is) across the United States. Studies show that most American families believe that spanking is good for kids, despite the fact that research has clearly established that, as normally practiced, it’s ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst—particularly for kids like I was then.
It’s perversely easy for a parent to be seduced into physical punishment. It can feel, at least in the moment, like you’re taking control, teaching a lesson, and showing your child who’s boss. And in fact, at least some research does suggest that under precisely controlled conditions (in terms of timing, intensity, and duration), physical punishment may be effective. Realistically, however, few if any parents can manage to get all these variables right in a heated situation. So instead, what kids usually get is slaps, spankings, and beatings delivered in anger, and resulting in no positive change in their behavior. My mom later told me she could see that spankings never made me better, but were rather merely an outlet for my dad’s fear and frustration.